Not Made in China, Designer Guillem Ferran Proves a Point with Products Made from Used Pallets (Photos)

Here is a series of objects with the unusual label "not made in China". The Catalan designer Guillem Ferran, whose Where Memory Used To Sit chair collection, Distendido and La Pell leather project we wrote about before, made it his mission to make objects from used pallets locally in Spain. Ferran explians:

95% of handmade products are made in Asia, the industrial trend from the end of the twentieth century, has been an effervescent delocalisation of production, to areas where you can speculate, with cheap labour costs.We can assume that Asia creates the best technology which we in the west consume. It is impossible not to find a Made in China label under any of the objects around you in daily life.

The designer also comments on the fact that it gets harder every day to spot the fakes amongst designer products, as cheap copies, from often less eco-friendly materials, hit the market. He claims that companies loose more than €200 Million annually due to the production of design copies and that a total 7% of the global commerce are pirate copies. In 2008, Ferran researched further, Spain spent 20.483 million dollars on imported products from China, compared to China who spent 1.889 million dollars on Spanish products.

Image Credit: Guillem Ferran

For his project "Not Made in China", Ferran works exclusively with waste pallets, which he transforms into 8 different objects following a simple process. The issues the designer wants to tackle are social reintegration, recycling, local production and resources, industrial contexts and the financial as well as ecological crisis. The series includes a door stop (I), a magazine rack (II), an easel (III) , a shelf (IV), a nest (V), a lamp (VI), a table (VII) and a stool (VIII). The object are the designer's criticism of today's industry and the growing trend of decentralizing cheap production.

VIII, a stool. Image Credit: Guillem Ferran

Not Made in China can be seen in Tarragona until next week, or visit Guillem Ferran's web site.